From TwitPitches to TwitQuiries…

Stowe Boyd is writing about his TwitPitches idea again. This is his practice of using Twitter for people to send him their elevator pitch.

I didn’t like them coming in his blog RSS feed to me–as I wrote, it isn’t what I expected or wanted from that venue. But I can see the value. Stowe wants to get through a blizzard of incoming PR requests to pitch ideas to him quickly. He doesn’t want to read lengthy PR releases or unneccesary chit chat from people he doesn’t know. He just wants to evaluate as quickly as possible whether it makes sense to dig any deeper or whether he just wants to hit the delete key.

In many ways this sort of quick inquiry is what I’ve always used messaging systems for. In one of my jobs my team was spread all over a building. It was easy to use AOL IM (pre-Twitter days!) to find out if someone was busy or had time to meet if I headed over. Messaging was faster and easier than the phone and it worked well.

Stowe is on to something here, but why stop at pitches? And why put it all exclusively through Twitter?

I’d love to have a “fast lane” for inquiries tied into my email account. I’d love to have a special Twitter “channel” for these things. It’d be great if I could be reached by either venue. Ditto phone calls and voicemail. The overriding consideration would be to keep it brief (Twitter’s 140 character limit is fine) and to the point. Better, give some flavors. a “yes/no” TwitQuiry has a built in Yes/No button. Bang one and the sender gets their answer. “Time” would be another goodie. Works for, “How long until you can take a call from me?” Or, “When will you be done with that preso you promised me?”

It probably makes sense to let people create their own Tweetlets (applets for TweetQuiries) that do these things. I can imagine them being really useful even for certain kinds of business process, for example. A tiny little bit of structure aimed at streamlining keystrokes will go a long way. There are lots of tiny interpersonal transactions that could be facilitated in this way.